Learn about ESP; why people panicked about electricity in the 1800s; and how embryos use sound to prepare for the world. Is there such a thing as ESP? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Anay in Georgia) ESP: What can science say? (2021). Berkeley.edu. https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/esp Engber, D. (2017, June 7). Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real. Which Means Science Is Broken. Slate Magazine; Slate. https://slate.com/health-and-science/2017/06/daryl-bem-proved-esp-is-real-showed-science-is-broken.html Lavoie, A. (2008, January 3). Neuroimaging fails to demonstrate ESP is real. Harvard Gazette; Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/01/neuroimaging-fails-to-demonstrate-esp-is-real/ Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021524 In the 1800s, the War of the Currents led to panic over electricity by Cameron Duke Lantero, Allison. “The War of the Currents: AC vs. DC Power.” Energy.gov, 18 Nov. 2014, www.energy.gov/articles/war-currents-ac-vs-dc-power Owen, Jonathan. “Electrocution: A Shocking Misuse? : Word Count : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus.” www.visualthesaurus.com, 19 Dec. 2013, www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wc/electrocution-a-shocking-misuse/ Sullivan, J.P. “Fearing Electricity: Overhead Wire Panic in New York City.” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 14, no. 3, 1995, pp. 8–16, http://doi.org/10.1109/44.464629 Wuebben, Daniel L. Power-Lined : Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind. University Of Nebraska Press, 2019 Embryos use sound to prepare for the outside world by Cameron Duke “Embryos of Many Species Use Sound to Prepare for the Outside World.” ScienceDaily, 26 May 2021, Embryos of many species use sound to prepare for the outside world. (2021). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/05/210526132128.htm Mariette, M. M., Clayton, D. F., & Buchanan, K. L. (2021). Acoustic developmental programming: a mechanistic and evolutionary framework. Trends in Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2021.04.007 Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn about ESP; why people panicked about electricity in the 1800s; and how embryos use sound to prepare for the world.
Is there such a thing as ESP? by Ashley Hamer (Listener question from Anay in Georgia)
In the 1800s, the War of the Currents led to panic over electricity by Cameron Duke
Embryos use sound to prepare for the outside world by Cameron Duke
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/does-esp-exist
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, we’ll answer a listener question about extrasensory perception, or ESP. Then, you’ll learn why people panicked about electricity in the 1800s; and how embryos use sound to prepare for the outside world.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
We got a listener question from Anay, who’s 10 years old and lives in Georgia. Anay writes, “Is there such thing as ESP (Extrasensory Perception), and if so, what are the chances of having it?” Great question, Anay!
ESP is defined as an awareness that comes through something other than the five known senses — stuff like telepathy, or mind reading; clairvoyance, or perceiving something elsewhere in space or time; and precognition, or seeing into the future. All of that is generally considered to be in the realm of the paranormal, or things that are outside the understanding of science. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be studied scientifically. I mean, after all, if you say you can read your friend’s mind, it should be pretty simple to sit you down in a lab, put your friend in another room, and have you tell a scientist what your friend is thinking.
Or so you’d think. In fact, scientists have been studying ESP for decades, and they still can’t say for sure whether ESP exists. Here’s the problem: for one thing, it’s basically impossible to prove something doesn’t exist — I mean, you’ve never seen Bigfoot, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t hiding in a forest somewhere. And for another thing, the studies that have found evidence for ESP have had problems.
The best studies define their methods ahead of time, saying how they’ll study the phenomenon, how many volunteers they’ll use, and how they’ll do the math afterward. It’s like football: you have to follow the rules and play until the game is over; you can’t change the rules to give your team an advantage or stop the game when you’re ahead.
But a lot of the scientists behind ESP studies might have tried the study 10 different times and crunched the numbers a bunch of different ways in order to get a result that made it look like the volunteers have ESP. Then only that experiment ended up in the study. The scary thing is, up until recently, those were very normal things to do in science. In fact, an ESP study that made it into a famous journal in 2011 led scientists to change how scientific studies are done. It’s now becoming more common to “pre-register” your experiments — that is, to write down how you’re going to do the experiment before you do it so you can’t tweak it later to get the answer you want.
So the answer to your question? We don’t know if ESP exists, but with everything we do know about how the universe works, the evidence would have to be pretty good to prove it. Thanks for your question, Anay! If you have a question, send a voice message or an email to curiosity at discovery dot com or leave us a voicemail at 312-596-5208.
130 years ago, electricity was a hot new technology. At the time, cities were electrifying by building wooden poles and stringing up wires, all to bring electric light into people’s homes for the first time. Like Macs and PCs, there were two fiercely competitive technologies vying for the right to light those bulbs. Get ready to hear about the War of the Currents.
In one corner was direct current, or DC electricity. Machines called dynamos generated this electricity and pumped it along wires at a constant voltage in one direction like water flowing downstream. The man championing this technology? None other than Thomas Edison.
In the other corner was an invention by another household name: Nikola Tesla. He had invented a generator that produced an electrical current that would reverse its flow several times a second. This was known as alternating current, or AC electricity, and it was being sold by Edison’s competitor, an entrepreneur named George Westinghouse.
As cities adopted one technology over the other, it became clear that alternating current was the way to go. It was more user-friendly and could support larger electrical grids than direct current could. For these reasons, the War of the Currents was a war that Edison wasn’t on track to win. But he wasn’t going down without a fight.
As both companies rapidly expanded their electrical coverage, several deadly isolated incidents triggered what one writer later dubbed the “Overhead Wire Panic” of 1889. This was a sudden outbreak of fear over the potential dangers of electricity. Within these fears, Edison saw opportunity.
He staged several high-profile publicity stunts aimed at convincing the general public that alternating current was dangerous while his direct current was much safer. These stunts included horrifying public displays that involved using AC to electrocute animals, including an elephant. In fact, the word “electrocute” was coined thanks to Edison’s antics (it’s a combination of the words “electricity” and “execute”). When New York State built their electric chair in 1889, Edison convinced them to use AC to power it as another tactic to stoke public fear against the technology. This was all despite the fact that he knew there was nothing inherently dangerous about AC that couldn’t also be said of DC.
Eventually, despite the fear tactics, AC won out as the dominant technology and we all moved on. But it goes to show you, even the simplest new technologies can come as a shock to the system.
As an embryo develops, it’s not just its genes that determine how it looks when it hatches from the egg. The environment also plays a role. For example, the sex of a turtle is determined not by its genes, but by the temperature during its development. Now, new research is finding that sound influences development too.
It turns out that embryos listen to their surrounding environment. It’s called acoustic developmental programming. Even though it’s a pretty recent discovery, evidence suggests it’s actually fairly common among many different species.
According to Dr. Mylene Mariette of Deacon University in Australia, the most common form of acoustic developmental programming is found in egg-laying species like birds and reptiles. Many of these species use vibrational cues to let them know the best times to hatch.
Take zebra finches. These birds are a dazzling but common study species native to Australia that will make calls to each other as they cooperate to incubate their eggs. Scientists noticed that the parents-to-be tend to make high-pitched calls when the weather is particularly warm. It turns out that the embryos in their eggs eavesdrop on these calls and respond by speeding up their development. Even cooler, these offspring grow up to be more tolerant of the heat.
Other studies have found that the lowly stink bug listens to its environment from the egg, too. When one stink bug egg hatches in a clutch of eggs, it creates a pulsed vibration that triggers its siblings to climb out of their eggs, too.
Red-eyed tree frog embryos are able to discern between sounds caused by predators and harmless sounds like thunder and rain. The sounds of predators munching on frog eggs sends the embryos into accelerated development so they can hatch and hopefully escape being a meal.
Human fetuses even have the ability to listen to sounds from within the womb, and some evidence suggests that prenatal auditory stimulation is crucial for normal brain development. Studies have found that a newborn’s cries are actually influenced by its parents’ native language.
The effects of acoustic developmental programming are still being explored, with new discoveries being added all the time. But be careful what you say around embryos. They’re listening.
CODY: Before we recap what we learned today, we have a quick favor to ask: vote for Curiosity Daily in the 2021 Podcast Awards! Visit podcast-awards-dot-com, register your email address, and find us in the drop-down menus for the categories of Education and Science & Medicine. Voting in all other categories is optional! And when you vote, you can also volunteer to be a judge to help select winners once finalists are announced in August, and that’ll give you an extra chance to vote for our show. So take a minute this weekend to visit podcast-awards-dot-com; we’ll also include this info — and a link — in today’s show notes. And now, here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll hear next week on Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: I don’t know if you know this Cody, but next week is… SHARK WEEK!
CODY: Ooh! Cue the music! [play music]
ASHLEY: Well, next week, you’ll learn about how ominous music in shark programming could hinder conservation efforts…
CODY: Oh… OH. Sorry. Lemme just… [cut music] Okay, then. So, no fancy music next week, I guess?
ASHLEY: Yeah, probably not. But hey! You’ll also learn about how we just found the largest glowing shark species in the world;
What it’s like to film sharks — including the new technology cinematographers are using to do it;
Why Megalodon was so dang huge
And more!
CODY: And we’ll satisfy more than just your shark curiosity, with our usual mix of a little bit of everything. You’ll learn about how your birthday affects the likelihood that you have a criminal record;
Why some people have a severe hatred of certain sounds;
Why the Milky Way probably didn’t form from a collision like we thought…
ASHLEY: Yeah, we’ve got a pretty action-packed week. But for now, let’s recap what we learned today.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Today’s writers were Cameron Duke and Ashley Hamer, who’s also our managing editor.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: Have a great weekend! You don’t have to have ESP to know that you can join us again Monday to learn something new in just a few minutes. So, you know… do that.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!